Your Friends Are All Dead--April Fools!

In an effort to bring attention to the seriousness of drinking and driving, police in Oceanside, California, visited 20 classrooms with some sobering news: Several classmates of theirs had been killed over the weekend in horrific crashes:

Classmates wept. Some became hysterical.

A few hours and many tears later, though, the pain turned to fury when the teenagers learned that it was all a hoax, a scared-straight exercise designed by school officials to dramatize the consequences of drinking and driving.

Some of her classmates became extremely upset, prompting the teacher to tell them immediately that it was all staged.

"People started yelling at the teacher," she said. "It was pretty hectic."

"They were traumatized, but we wanted them to be traumatized," said guidance counselor Lori Tauber, who helped organize the shocking exercise and got dozens of students to participate. "That's how they get the message."

This is pretty much the worst idea I have heard in my life. What's next, pulling the students that smoke out of class to tell them their parents just died of cancer? Haha, just kidding, Timmy, I hope you learned a good lesson.

I thought the idea of anything nowadays is to win the hearts and minds of kids? I hear that nearly every day of my life--if you want to get kids to trust you, you must first win their hearts and minds. First though, let's fuck with them, tell them their friends are all dead. THEN we win their hearts and minds. High school kids don't trust cops to begin with, I'm sure lying to them and making them go into hysterics won't help the situation.

That's gonna drive kids to drink